George Boas

From Philosopedia

Boas, George (28 August 1891 - 17 March 1980)

Boas obtained both a B.A. and an M.A. in philosophy at Brown University. He then studied at Columbia University and in 1917 earned his Ph. D. at the University of California, Berkeley.

Boas, a professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University beginning in 1921, wrote The Inquiring Mind (1959) and edited Romanticism in America (1940).

During World War II, he was a Commander in the Naval Reserve.

When asked in 1951 if a philosophy, such as naturalistic humanism, could “spur the literary imagination as have deism, transcendentalism, or Christianity,” he responded to Warren Allen Smith:

Darwinism was a kind of naturalism, whether humanistic or not, I don’t know. It certainly spurred writers’ imaginations. Positivism of the Comtean and Machian types was behind a good deal of nineteenth-century impressionism—to the point where it might even be called the philosophy behind the aesthetics of that movement. And Comte himself called his religious doctrines “humanism.” I fail to see why any philosophical doctrine might not have its literary counterpoint. A writer has to ask himself certain questions about human nature and the nature of the world in which the human drama is acted, and the answer will be—or might be expected to be—the greatest influence in the formation of his writings. The influence on natural science on Zola, on George Eliot, on Theodore Dreiser, was obvious, but sometimes such an influence is transmitted on the writer though another writer. Thus the contemptus mundi theme in the Middle Ages sprang directly from certain Christian doctrines of man’s place in the universe. Such an attitude could manifest itself in painting directly by a Christian painter, but it could also be shown in the paintings of someone who was imitating the Christian painter and who never heard of the contemptus mundi theme. Similarly a novelist today who had never read Karl Marx would probably be influenced by his doctrines and would see society under the aspect of the class-struggle regardless of his own social views.

Consequently, if a novelist or poet should be convinced of the truth of naturalistic humanism, he would see men as having only this terrestrial life, as creatures of history possibly tragic, possibly comic, as individuals, not as examples of a class, and so on. If he really believed in the doctrine, his presentation of human beings would be different from that of a Catholic, a Pagan of ancient times, a Buddhist, or a Protestant. Wouldn’t Sartre’s own novels be evidence that atheistic humanism can “spur” the literary imagination? I would think that the influence of the various derivatives of Freudian psychology would be a kind of humanism. At any rate this was a relatively new conception of human nature, a conception which didn’t rest upon any special theistic postulates and which could even be reconciled with one form of Catholicism, that which springs from the Franciscan movement.

But the answer to your question seems to me so obviously affirmative that I am afraid I have missed the point. Maybe i you would tell me why anyone should think it would be negative, I could answer more effectively. I shall be very glad to continue this correspondence, if you should so desire. For one of my pet theories is that one cannot say in advance that any given philosophic doctrine will be aesthetically sterile.

Boas retired from Johns Hopkins University in 1956 but had a fellowship at the Center for Humanities at Wesleyan University and at the University of Pittsburgh was an Andrew W. Mellon visiting professor.

At the age of 89 he died and in his memory E. G. Gombrich included the following in his talk:

[Boas] was a philosopher and I am not, and so my tribute can ony be a personl, subjective one. But what else could it be? If Geore Boas had any one overriding philosophical conviction, it was the one expressed in the old scholastic adage of which he and Lovejoy tried in vain to find the source - the adage that individuum est ineffable. The individual is beyond the reach of speech because language in making use of universals imposes a network of general concepts on the multifaviour and teeming world of particulars and in so doing falsifies it. To quote two of his own formulations: "Reason stops short when confronted with individuals; the most it can do is invent a proper name or them" [The Limits of Reason, p. 51]; and again: "Since we express our findings in common nouns and adjectives, in prepositions and verbs, in other words in universals, the choice is between applying general terms to particular things and events or saying nothing. [The Inquiring Mind, p. 18]"

He was a philosopher, an historian of ideas, a critic, an aesthetician, a classical scholar, a linguist equally at home in English, French, Greek, and Latin, and well versed in Italian and German. He was a dedicated teacher and, what may be less well known, also a novelist and writer of short stories, a poet who characteristically published his slim volume of verse in only twenty-five copies; he was a trained artist, a Museum administrator, a music lover, a farmer. He was a lover of justice and fighter against intolerance and bigotry, a loving husband, father, and grandfather, and an incomparable friend. . . .

Works

The Hieroglyphics of Horapollo - translation of the original work (1950)

Dominant Themes in Modern Philosophy (1957)

The Inquiring Mind (1959)

Rationalism in Greek Philosophy (1961)

The Heaven of Invention (1962)

The Cult of Childhood (London, Warburg Institute, 1966)

Vox Populi (1969)

The History of Ideas: An Introduction (1969)

{WAS, 20 February 1951}